Max Frankel had a brilliant 50-year career at The New York Times, where he
was executive editor from 1986 to 1994, having started as a college correspondent
while a sophomore at Columbia University. After graduating from
Columbia, he began reporting from the Pentagon, later moving on to Vienna,
Moscow, and Havana. He was The Times Washington, DC bureau chief when
he won a 1973 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of President Richard M. Nixon’s
trip to China. In fall 2006, Frankel and Dean David Rudenstine taught The
Law, The Ethics, and The Politics of Press Freedoms, a seminar that examined
the current and historical relationships between journalism and the law.
Cardozo Life editor Susan Davis sat down with Frankel for a wide-ranging one-on-one about his career, journalism, and his interest in teaching.

DAVIS: How did you meet David Rudenstine?

FRANKEL: I read David before I met him. I thought his book
on the Pentagon Papers case—which I was very much
involved in—was the best book on the subject. We appeared
on one or two panels together to discuss the Pentagon
Papers. We developed a friendship, and then the interest and
idea of teaching a seminar at Cardozo grew from there.

DAVIS: Had you taught previously?

FRANKEL: I had taught a seminar at Columbia Journalism
School the previous year, and many years ago I conducted
Great Books courses for business executives at the Aspen
Institute. So, I’ve done a little bit of seminar teaching.

DAVIS: Did you have certain aspirations for the seminar at
Cardozo?

FRANKEL: Yes, two things. After I retired, I missed contact
with younger people and the stimulation that comes from
interacting with them. That was the main attraction. The
other was simply to learn more about the law affecting pressgovernment
relations, which was the subject of the seminar.

DAVIS: Did you achieve your aspirations?

FRANKEL: Absolutely. Great students!

DAVIS: Are you teaching now?

FRANKEL: The core curriculum at Columbia has a course
called Contemporary Civilization, which consists of original
readings from Aristotle and other great philosophers right
up to the current period. All freshman are required to take
such a course, and there are many small sections of 15 to 18
students—one of which I’m going to teach with a former
classmate.

I’ll be reading a lot and finally mastering a course that I
had to take as a freshman while coming in contact with
young people, which is what I value. This one promises to be
very hard work. Four hours a week of very heavy reading.

DAVIS:
You said you were involved with the Pentagon Papers?
What role did you play in the publication of the Papers?

FRANKEL: I was The Times Washington bureau chief at the
time. The reporter Neil Sheehan, who made the original
contact with the people who gave us the Pentagon Papers,
brought the papers to me. I conveyed them to New York. I
was the middle man initially, then I helped with some of the
writing and editing. I also helped to persuade the publisher
that we should publish them. When we were dragged into
court, I was designated to help the lawyers that were representing
us all the way up to the Supreme Court. I helped
write some of the briefs. I was involved at various stages of
the whole project. But it was all very intense. It took us three
months to prepare the Papers, but the legal fight was only
two and one-half weeks.

DAVIS: In a review of your book The Times of My Life, and My
Life With ‘The Times’, I read that Sheehan came to you with
a “bag of papers.”

FRANKEL: We couldn’t really make a decision about whether
we were seriously interested in publishing the Papers unless
we saw samples. Sheehan went to his sources, who wanted
to know, “Will The New York Times publish these?” And The
New York Times was saying, “We can’t tell you that unless we
see some of it.” So he brought us some samples.

DAVIS: This brings us to the issue of journalist privilege and
keeping sources confidential. In March 2007, at a Cardozo panel on the subject, I believe you came down on the side
of freedom of the press with no interference by judges. Is
that accurate?

FRANKEL: Many states have laws that grant a limited privilege
to reporters not to reveal their sources even at the
demand of courts and judges. And that is a great protection.
The question is whether there should be a federal law. Many
of my colleagues in the press are in favor of one. And while
I can see its merits, I see two big problems. First, when the
government comes into most courtrooms and
pleads that the demands of national security
require them to know a journalist’s sources, most
judges fall all over themselves and give in to the
government. When they hear “national security,”
judges are not going to side with the press.

The second issue with such a law is, who is a
journalist? In the era of the Internet, anybody
who writes a blog, who publishes anything on the
Internet can claim to be a journalist. Every historian
writing a book is a journalist. So such a law
is very close to saying all Americans have a right
not to testify about their sources of information.

My position is that you cannot have sophisticated
reporting about military and diplomatic
affairs without confidential sources. Everything
the government does in the realm of foreign and
military policy, at least for an initial 10 to 15
years, is classified as secret. Therefore, officials
who want to explain their policies to justify what
they are doing, or to inform the American public
about what is going on, are going to have to talk
about their secrets. If the government wants to
explain itself, it has to discuss these secrets. And
if they are hiding things, if they are eavesdropping
on the American public or torturing people and violating
the law, the only way the press is going to find out and
play its role as a watchdog over government is to have confidential
conversations with people who are willing for their
own reasons to talk about it.

At the Cardozo panel, Tony Lewis, a colleague of mine at
The Times, was taking the position that you have to trust the
judges because they protect First Amendment freedoms. I
was saying, yes, judges have expanded the realm of First
Amendment freedoms, but not in national security cases.
For the most part, judges take the government’s word when
national security is involved; they are going to rule for the
government. This did not happen with the Pentagon Papers,
but that was a case of preventing publication once the secret
was already out.

DAVIS: So, where were you in the Judith Miller imbroglio?

FRANKEL: That is a different issue. Some of Judy’s reporting
going into the Iraq war was indefensible. It was sloppy. It
was accepting the government’s word. It was biased. I don’t
want to defend that. But when the issue became in the interest
of prosecuting [I. Lewis “Scooter”] Libby, did the government
have a right to know her sources? I think she was right
in withholding. I think the government was wrong in putting
her in jail. Sometimes to defend a decent legal principle
you have to defend people whose conduct you don’t necessarily
approve of.

DAVIS: You mentioned bloggers and journalists. Just this
week a blogger, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, won
the prestigious George Polk Award for legal reporting. This
seems like a watershed moment for the newspaper business
and journalism. What does the landscape look like from
your point of view?

FRANKEL: I don’t know where it’s going. The average blogger, not the fellow who won the award, is like the old fashioned
pamphleteer. I don’t know what they do for income. Perhaps
they have rich parents or stay up late after work and write
what they know, or what they’ve heard, or what they’ve
read. And while that’s often useful in creating networks of
information, it is not journalism in the sophisticated sense:
an organized, very expensive effort to explain the world to a
large body of people who come to rely on you for their daily
grist of information for their businesses and citizenship.

To take the extreme, for The New York Times to cover Iraq
takes tens of millions of dollars a year. To keep three or four
correspondents in Baghdad means you have to hire 15 security
people, you need three or four armored trucks or armorplated
cars, you need translators, you have to pay for these
people to commute back and forth between Baghdad and the
US for rest and rehab. You have to take care of their families
at home. Insure them for health and against death. That’s
journalism. And that’s one war and one country.

So, to say bloggers who are home hitting their Internet
keys are replacing journalism, that’s ridiculous. What’s happened
is the Internet is stealing readers, stealing young
people’s time from reading print, moving them onto the
Internet, and it is also beginning to steal advertising from
print media, especially newspapers. The Internet is much
more efficient as an advertising medium
for real estate and help wanted ads
and others. So, newspapers are losing
their readers and their advertising.

What is going to support and
finance what I call serious, organized
journalism? That is far from clear. The
publisher of The New York Times likes
to say, “We don’t care. We gather information
and we don’t care how we distribute
it. If one day we don’t need a
printing plant or trucks and paper and
we distribute on the Internet, that will
still be our business.” That’s fine, provided
that the Internet produces
enough revenue to support serious
journalism.

Print journalism as I knew it was
the crazy accident of 100 to 150 years
ago, when Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Saks Fifth
Avenue, and Bloomingdale’s needed
newspapers to promote their businesses
and were willing to do that in pages that otherwise covered
famine in Cambodia and war in the center of Europe.
Serious journalism coexisted with clothing and brassiere
ads. That was a successful business model to support journalism
and keep it independent of government interference.
Now some people are saying maybe serious journalism has
to become nonprofit or maybe government or unions have
to support it. So the future is uncertain. I hope I live long
enough to see what the answer is.

DAVIS: Then, you don’t blog?

FRANKEL: No, I don’t blog. I read blogs.

Marshall, who won the Polk Award, is starting a business.
He’s no longer blogging by himself. He’s found a way to
attract advertising on the Web; he’s hiring other reporters;
and they are becoming a minijournalistic operation. A
friend of mine, Paul Steiger, who used to be editor at The
Wall Street Journal, has found a foundation to give him
money, and he’s starting an investigative reporting group.
He’s paying the reporters what they were paid at The New
York Times and Washington Post. They will find areas of
investigation and perform a watchdog function on local
politicians or the national government. He raised the money
basically from one family, making it a philanthropic effort.

So things are happening and people are experimenting.
The Times itself is on the Web. They are trying to learn how
to use it and whether enough advertising can be attracted to
support it. It’s all in its infancy. It’s like Hollywood in
Thomas Edison’s day.

DAVIS: What do you think of The Times new building, designed
by Renzo Piano, which opened this past fall?

FRANKEL: The new building is impressive architecturally
and in design terms. The new newsroom is so vast—built
around an atrium—so spread out that it doesn’t have any of
the grubby charm and sense of togetherness of the old newsroom.
So I miss it.

The executive editor, like everyone else, has a totally
glass-enclosed office, so the first thing he did was bring in a
screen so that he gets some privacy when he meets people.
But this is a new era, and they don’t need a newsroom in my
sense with typewriters and linoleum on the floor. They need
studios and cameras and all that nonsense. I hope it works
for them. It doesn’t work for me.

DAVIS: Can we talk a little about your career as a journalist.
I know that you were in Moscow, covered Cuba, and
Kennedy. Did you ever meet Fidel Castro?

FRANKEL: I met Fidel only when he came to New York [April
1959]. I was on my way to Cuba. But when I was in Havana,
I met a lot of his people. I was there six months, and finally
they threw me out.

DAVIS: Are you eager to go back?

FRANKEL: No, I was in Cuba when Fidel was betraying his
promise to create a democracy. His revolution was organized
in the name of overthrowing a dictatorship. And he
imposed a dictatorship far more brutal than the one he replaced.
I saw this emerging, and in many ways it was worse
than Russia after Stalin. Fidel was a demagogue. A very talented
speaker, brilliant, but nonetheless a demagogue. He
reminded me of my very young years in Nazi Germany. He
had Hitler’s talent and gift of speech and got people excited
and passionate about giving away their own freedom, all in
the name of economic benefit and security.

He made a mess of that country. It wasn’t any good
before him. And the United States was terrible in supporting
the dictators over the years. So we have nothing to be proud
of in the history of Cuba. And a Cuban patriot had every reason
to resent the United States. But to go ahead and deliver
it to the Communists and turn it into a poorhouse was no
answer. I was there when all of this was evolving. I found out
that Castro wasn’t a Communist to start, but was rapidly
becoming one and using his connections to the Russians to
promote his style of regime. It just put me off.

I loved the Cuban people. They were very democratic in
spirit. They love Hollywood and baseball; they love their
music and their art. They call even the highest officials
“chico.” They had a brilliant future, and he just robbed them
of 50 years. I hope that after Castro someone better will
come along.

The problem with being a journalist is that you become
intensely interested in what you are doing when you are
doing it, but then you go on to the next thing. You don’t
develop life-long attachments. That’s the negative side.

DAVIS: What about Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis.
My daughter, who just graduated from college, sees Kennedy
in a very negative light.

FRANKEL: Kennedy was extremely deft and very clever, and
he resisted the worst possible advice to start a major war with
the Russians or invade Cuba and make matters even worse.

DAVIS: How long were you in Moscow?

FRANKEL: Three years, under Krushchev and at a very exciting
time. Things were just starting to open up. After Stalin,
people began to get a taste of not freedom but relaxation.
Prisoners were coming out of the gulag. Housing was going
up. The government was beginning to provide consumer
goods, allow cultural exchanges. The two societies that were
standing toe to toe as victors in Europe were threatening
each other. Both had hydrogen weapons and space vessels.
So you had Russia recovering from having lost 40 million
people, and the United States feeling threatened for the first
time. This was a period when both countries were afraid of
each other for no good reason. But armed to the teeth.

So I found myself in Moscow at this interesting time,
when no matter what I wrote about was of great interest to
the people in the United States, who wanted to know everything
about the Russian people. It was a fascinating period.
And to have had that experience before I was 30 was a lifechanging
experience.